The Terror Connection

AT FIRST GLANCE, Abdulrahman el-Bahnasawy, a Muslim kid from the suburbs of Toronto, seemed an unlikely jihadi. A soft-spoken 18-year-old with delicate features and thick curly hair, he had rejected Islam at 15, announcing to his parents, conservative Egyptian immigrants, that he was now an agnostic. This, he would write later, was just one of the many troubles he caused his family: After he discovered weed at 14, his terrified parents moved with him and his older sister to Kuwait. There, lonely and bullied in school, he began to take every drug he could get his hands on. He attempted suicide several times. Foreshadowing the bipolar disorder and schizophrenia he would later be diagnosed with, he would sit on the toilet in his parents’ house for hours, huffing butane and hallucinating, conversing with “Hamtaramo,” an imaginary pilot who spoke to him through the radio. “He was,” Bahnasawy wrote later, “like a friend.”

Back in Toronto, after he did a stint in rehab, his family put him in an Islamic school where he soon turned to the Koran with the same ravenous enthusiasm he had previously reserved for drugs. At his parents’ house, he haunted jihadi chat rooms that served as de facto recruitment centers for disaffected young Muslims yearning for something different and purer than their lives in the West. “I realized Islam would fix all the problems in society or the world in general,” he wrote later, “and that its lifestyle would have prevented the life I lived.”

Online, he met a hardened fighter who went by the nom de guerre Abu Isa al-Amriki, “The American.” Despite his sobriquet, The American was a Sudanese national living in Syria, and according to the Pentagon, he was a member of ISIS’S secretive external operations branch, devoted to building a global network of homegrown terrorists to challenge the enemies of the caliphate on their own turf. After Bahnasawy proved his commitment with a donation of $500 and some cellphones for the brothers in jihad, Amriki began to give him assignments, small tasks like vetting other new recruits and hacking into the cellphones of members to discover if they were undercover law enforcement—in one case, when Bahnasawy determined a recruit was a cop, he doxed him, releasing his photo to a chat group with an admonishment to kill him.

Another recruit Bahnasawy met online was an 18-year-old much like himself, a Muslim raised in Colorado named Talha Haroon who sometimes went by the screen name “Kill Kuffars,” or “Kill Infidels.” Haroon’s interest in joining ISIS might have been personal revenge: In 2007, his father, Haroon Rashid, was deported from the United States following a conviction of misdemeanor assault (that was later overturned) and, in an unrelated incident, terrorism charges that were later dropped. In 2014, Haroon joined his father in Pakistan, where, he told Bahnasawy, he linked up with the Taliban and hoped to fight with ISIS. A photo published by BBC English shows a long-haired, beatific young man barely old enough to vote, wearing a white shalwar kameez, holding a white cockatiel, and raising his right index finger, a common gesture of support for ISIS.

In early 2016, Amriki offered the two 18-year-olds the opportunity to demonstrate the depths of their commitment. ISIS was being pressed on all sides by an alliance of countries that included the United States, France, Iraq, and Canada, Bahnasawy’s home, and to show ISIS’S capacity to fight back, the organization’s leadership was planning a series of worldwide assaults for Ramadan that summer. Would Bahnasawy and Haroon team up to carry